Early Life
Hartmann was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the son of a staunch conservative Republican, atheist father and a Christian mother, and grew up in nearby Lansing, Michigan. His paternal grandparents were from Norway. Interested in politics from a young age, he campaigned for Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential election when he was 13. Although a gifted student, Hartmann was expelled from high school during tenth grade and later earned a GED.
Hartmann enrolled at Lansing Community College and transferred to Michigan State University, majoring in electrical engineering. In 1968, Hartmann opened his first business, a repair shop named The Electronics Joint located next to Michigan State University and became a part-time disc jockey at local country music station WITL. With Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Hartmann protested against the Vietnam War .
Read more about this topic: Thom Hartmann
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough.... He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)